At last, there was movement from the trooper behind our car. He circled our car until he was facing us. Battery cables in hand, he popped his hood. We popped ours, then watched him link our batteries. One jolt did it. Our car’s engine roared back to life.
I have no memory of that trooper speaking a single word to us. He never smiled. We might as well not have been there. It was as if as an officer of the law he was duty-bound to help us, but he was determined not to give us the tiniest measure of respect.
“Redneck,” my mother and I muttered when he was gone.
Maybe he’d had a bad day. Maybe he’d jumped six cars since breakfast and could have told us to call AAA instead. But I felt an unease after that brush, one that sat in my stomach like a rock. My America was not the same one my parents had known, but the remnants of meaner times lingered on that expressway.
As the miles on the road passed, separating us from the spot where our car had been stalled, my mother and I felt our moods improving. The day belonged to us again. Our chatter resumed, and eventually our laughter. Because the CB radio had been so good to us, we turned it back on to hear our new friends. Nothing had changed since we’d listened last. The chatter we heard was bawdy and coarse, in merry Southern drawls, redneck to the core.
I spotted a highway patrol car crouching in the bushes, so I grabbed the CB. “Watch out for Smokey around the bend,” I said, just doing my part for our friends.
Seventeen
PATRICIA STEPHENS DUE
“Sticks in a bundle are unbreakable.”
—Bondei proverb
I had just been arrested again when I heard about the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham in September 1963. For a moment, I felt paralyzed with disbelief. As much as we’d been going through, I still couldn’t believe the people who opposed us could go to such lengths, bombing a church and killing innocent children.
Theater demonstrations had brought me to jail again. By now, mass demonstrations were becoming a more common sight across the United States. In addition to the demonstrations in Birmingham and the March on Washington, thousands of people were taking part in marches and pickets all over the South. Injuries against protesters were mounting, and jails were being filled to capacity.
In Tallahassee, students returning to campus after the summer break turned out in impressive numbers to be arrested in theater demonstrations, in wave after wave. First, on Saturday, September 14, about 200 of us went to the Florida Theatre to protest the theater’s segregation policies. I’d had a wisdom tooth extracted that morning, but I went straight from the dentist’s office to the Florida Theatre. Even though I never got my painkiller prescription filled, I didn’t give my tooth another thought.
This time, the movie showing was The Day Mars Invaded Earth, and I’m certain it must have felt that way to many white onlookers who gazed at the thronging crowd of Negroes. A photograph of that day clearly shows me and John at that protest. I am wearing my dark glasses, as usual, and there is a very determined expression on my face, and a crowd of students is behind me, clapping and singing in front of the theater. Many of the students there, like FAMU business and education sophomore Doris Rutledge (who would later become a lifelong friend), brought money to purchase a movie ticket, then remained to protest when refused. When police tried to disperse us based on the injunction issued the spring before against large-scale protests, some of the students opted to leave, but 157 of us were arrested, including me, Doris Rutledge, Rubin Kenon, and Calvin Bess. Doris has told me how a police officer struck the inside of her left leg with his nightstick while she was being herded into a police van. Nothing was broken, she says, but it was so painful that she was afraid she might lose the leg, and the bruise lingered a long time. She suspects that her leg never healed properly from the blow; she had never had leg problems before, but her left leg remained weak and has thrown her off balance in the years since. “I’m thankful I have this leg,” she told us at a civil rights reunion at my home in 1997, surrounded by activists who had stories of their own to tell. “It is a memory of trying to go someplace where everyone should have had a right to participate: going to a theater. I was beaten by a cop because that was all I wanted to do.”1
Word of the arrests spread back to campus, and 450 students came to the jail to protest. Of those, ninety-one were arrested for disturbing the peace when they marched near the jail. The following morning, the day of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing, 250 students returned to the jail to protest. Most of them left after Rev. C. K. Steele, Rev. E. G. Evans, Rev. David Brooks, and some Florida A&M deans pleaded with them to avoid arrest, but a hundred students refused to leave, sitting calmly on the ground or praying, and they were arrested. The total number of students arrested in those two days was 348.2
Tallahassee’s involved adults had their hands full with the mass protests, and it was considered a crisis in the city. Rev. Steele, remember, had been supportive of our direct action protests in the past, but clearly he believed our actions at that time were becoming too radical, resulting in expensive arrests. Some of our other adult friends in the community also believed we should have adhered to the judge’s injunction, but we felt that our willingness to face arrest would accomplish more than programmed demonstrations of fewer than twenty students.
The decision was controversial, since the split between the more conservative NAACP and organizations like SNCC and CORE was growing at that time, and we had to rely many times on the NAACP and its lawyers to help us get our students out of jail. (One of the NAACP lawyers who was often there for us was Charles Wilson of Pensacola.) But Miss Young, FAMU’s assistant registrar, understood. She made pleas on our behalf, telling NAACP officials, “These students, they want to do something. They’re daring, and they want to do something, and this is what they did.”
On October 3, Judge Ben Willis handed down his convictions. He was hardest on me and Rubin because we were considered the organizers. We were sentenced to $1,000 fines or six months in jail. The others who had been arrested at the theater were divided into groups. Those who had participated in the May theater demonstration, like Doris Rutledge, were fined $500 or three months in jail. A third group was sentenced to $250 or forty-five days in jail. The remaining 119 students received suspended sentences because Judge Willis believed they had been victims of “faulty leadership.” He warned them, “You are not forgiven.… You are given the opportunity to prove you can conduct yourselves in a lawful and peaceful manner. You have many opportunities to serve your race, your community, your state, and your nation, all of them dignified and peaceful.”3
Immediately, thirty-seven of the students decided they would go to jail rather than pay their fines, including Doris. It was a difficult decision, but Rubin and I decided we could do more good if we did not spend that time in jail. Not only did we hope to remain active as organizers, but we both were scheduled to begin student teaching in the field. I had an internship in Jacksonville, I was finally scheduled to graduate in January, and I really wanted to prove that activists could take part in demonstrations and complete their studies. But where would we find the money to help get so many students out of jail? CORE, as usual, had very little.
Miss Young and fired FAMU professor Richard Haley worked frantically to raise money, spending late nights at the CORE office on Floral Street waiting for telephone calls from the national NAACP office, the national CORE office, and any other organizations that would hear their pleas. Very late one night while they worked, Miss Young recalled, there was a knock at the door. They both looked at each other, nervous.
“Haley told me to go in the back, in the mimeograph room. He said, ‘Go back there and unlock that back door, so if there’s trouble, you get out of here. I’m going to answer the door.’ It was just that dangerous during that time,” Miss Young said. When Mr. Haley opened that door, he got one of the surprises of his life: Two white Tallahassee residents, a banker named George Lewis II and an entrepreneur named
James Shaw, were standing outside the office in the dead of night. The men gave them $7,000 in cash.
“They didn’t want it to be known,” Miss Young said. In fact, I discovered later, it was such a secret that even Mr. Lewis’s wife, a very liberal woman named Clifton Lewis, knew nothing about her husband’s donation at the time. “He might have had to borrow it, or he might have had to sell stock. I don’t know what he did. And I didn’t know he did it, but I sure am glad he did,” Mrs. Lewis told me years later, when we interviewed her not long after her husband died.
Despite being firmly established in Tallahassee’s white power structure, at the time of the theater demonstrations George Lewis had recently suffered his own setbacks because of his political beliefs and activism. Mr. Lewis had chaired a committee that released a document entitled the Report on the Florida Advisory Committee to the United States Commission on Civil Rights, which severely criticized state officials and the lack of civil rights progress in Florida, comparing the state’s practices to those in Mississippi and Alabama. As a result of his position on that committee, Mr. Lewis was removed as president of Lewis State Bank, the family bank. (He was named chairman of the board, but that was a non-voting position, and therefore one with less power.) CORE had its account at Lewis State Bank, and it was one of the very few institutions that was willing to lend Negroes money in times of need. But on that night, George Lewis and James Shaw had come through with an outright gift, not a loan.
“I’ll never forgot that night,” Miss Young told me. “We sat there after they were gone. I said, ‘Haley, there’s a God somewhere. There’s a God somewhere. There’s a God somewhere.’ ”
One thing many people forget when they think in terms of the civil rights movement is that there were many whites, as well as Negroes, who put their lives and livelihoods at risk. All of us worked together, whether it was the white FSU students who bought movie tickets for Negroes to try to gain entrance, white students who went to jail, or the white community members who gave time and money to help the cause. But you see, I never simply saw it as a black cause, because any system in place to oppress blacks ultimately oppresses everyone. I have always believed that none of us can be free until all of us are free. Many Tallahassee whites had learned that lesson during the 1960 jail-in, when they were not permitted to visit us to show their support. The white ministers and rabbis who came to Tallahassee during the 1961 Freedom Ride learned it when they were trying to order food at the municipal airport, and they later served jail time for that “offense.” James and Lillian Shaw (who later became two of Tananarive’s godparents) had always understood the oppressive nature of discrimination, and so had George and Clifton Lewis.
George Lewis II was president of Lewis State Bank and chairman of the Florida Advisory Committee of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, and the Lewises were both very involved. In May 1963, for example, Clifton Lewis participated in what CORE called the “Courtroom Project,” where whites purposely sat in the all-Negro section of the courtroom to protest segregation. They had long-standing community connections: George Lewis had been the college roommate of C. Farris Bryant, who later became a segregationist governor of Florida. The Lewises’ activism was a cause of concern among some whites in Tallahassee. They were once warned by a newspaper reporter that their telephones were wiretapped because of their involvement. Asked to describe one of the most frightening experiences of her involvement, Clifton Lewis, who at eighty-two, at this writing, is still politically active in Tallahassee, remembered being at home alone at dusk when she got a telephone call from an acquaintance. “He said, ‘Mrs. Lewis, are you there by yourself?’ And I said, ‘Yes.’ He said, ‘You have a lot of glass in that house, don’t you?’ I said, ‘Yes,’ ” Mrs. Lewis said—the caller was aware that her secluded Frank Lloyd Wright home had an entire wall made of glass. “And he said, ‘Well, I’ve just gotten the grapevine from Gainesville. You better get down in that cellar. They’re headed your way with a bomb from Gainesville. I’ve just called to tell you.’ ” Then the phone clicked off.
“I didn’t have a car,” Mrs. Lewis says. “I was here by myself. I don’t know where George was, but thank heavens there were no children here. And we didn’t get a bomb. But that was very scary.”
Their young son Ben, too, paid a price because he attended Leon County High School after it finally integrated in the fall of 1963. In part, Ben was targeted because everyone knew his father was on the Civil Rights Advisory Committee, and in part because of his own beliefs. When three Negro students were scheduled to attend the school, school administrators warned the Negro students’ families that they could not take physical education or have physical contact with white students, and that they should avoid the bathrooms because their safety could not be guaranteed. As for the white students, the principal told them they should ignore the Negro students. No one was to speak to a Negro. No one was to smile at a Negro.4
In the cafeteria, if a Negro student tried to sit at the table, the white students got up and moved, and young Ben Lewis didn’t agree with that. He tried to do his small part to make the Negro students feel welcome, his mother says. “Ben would go sit at that table with them. But he wouldn’t talk to them or smile,” she says. Still, that small gesture was enough to arouse white students’ ire. “He was afraid for his life to go to the restroom at Leon High, because that’s where they would get him,” Mrs. Lewis recalls. As Ben was leaving school to walk home one day, a car pulled up beside him and four young white men jumped out. Much to Ben’s horror, they forced him into their car at gunpoint. After the car screeched away with Ben held in the backseat, the car passed a group of Negroes standing beside the street. The captors rolled the back window down. “Go on, say it, you nigger lover! Call them niggers. Call them coons. That’s what they are. Say it!” they ordered. Reluctantly, but honestly afraid that the gun might fire even accidentally, Ben did as he was told. “Niggers!” he screamed out the window.
Only then did the young men let him go. Ben didn’t tell his mother that story until he was in his forties, after his father had died. But his parents did know about another incident, when Ben’s car got stuck in the sand at Alligator Point, a secluded spot where he’d gone to “spoon” with his girlfriend, his mother says, and some white men beat him up and destroyed his car. His date, luckily, was unharmed.
Despite the threats to their family, like the Steeles, the Lewises always stayed involved. George Lewis died in 1996 at the age of eighty-two, before I could interview him for this book, but he and his family were more unsung soldiers in the civil rights cause.
In the fall of 1963, only hours before the theater demonstration and the resulting arrests, some white students from the University of Florida in Gainesville, 150 miles southeast of Tallahassee, came to town. One was a tall woman with white-blond hair named Judith (Judy) Benninger, another was her boyfriend, a curly-haired man named Mike Geison, and the third was a lanky, pleasant-featured young man named Daniel (Dan) Harmeling. After spending the summer working with the Ocala NAACP branch and Bettie Wright with Dunnellon CORE, Judy and the others had come to Tallahassee to learn leadership skills and to take part in activities. “I was opening up my paper at least once a week, or once every two weeks, and seeing yet another demonstration or action Pat was involved in, so I actually went looking for her,” Judy told me and Tananarive in an interview in 1990, explaining how we had met. At the time we interviewed her, Judy was very ill with breast cancer, and her friends had assembled a video crew to document this brave woman’s place in Florida history, both in civil rights and women’s rights.
Judy had taken the lessons she learned in civil rights to the women’s movement, coauthoring a paper with Beverly Jones in 1968 entitled “Towards a Female Liberation Movement,” which has been widely anthologized and is credited with helping to launch the women’s liberation movement. She cofounded Gainesville Women’s Liberation in 1968, the first women’s liberation group in the South. She also became another of Tananarive
’s godmothers. (Tananarive had several, since so many people I knew from the Movement wanted to feel like a part of our daughter’s life.) “I was sort of pushing myself on Pat, and following her around trying to learn from her, and also trying to get to know her because I had never seen a woman lead like that. I had spent the whole summer watching men lead and do a very good job of it, but there was something for me about the fact that she was a woman. And she was also, as far as I was concerned, the best that I had seen, male or female, in terms of really teaching as well as mobilizing,” Judy said.5
A demonstration was planned the very day Judy arrived in Tallahassee, so the group from the University of Florida got a very sudden, unexpected initiation from us. As Dan recalls, he and his twin brother, Jim, had recently started attending NAACP meetings in Ocala, and Dan had come to Tallahassee to get even more deeply involved. Tallahassee was an eye-opener to him, Dan told me later. “In Gainesville, when we would have ten or fifteen people, with each person who joined the picket line, we’d feel just this enormous sense of strength. Now we were in a group that had literally hundreds of people willing to demonstrate,” he says.6
The next thing he knew, the demonstrators in front of the Florida Theatre were being warned that they were about to be arrested. Immediately after the warning, before Dan could make a conscious decision, he realized he was being herded toward a police van. Dan hadn’t planned to get arrested in Tallahassee, but once he realized he was getting arrested, he wanted to show his solidarity with the other students. Because there were so few white demonstrators, there was room for Dan at the Leon County jail instead of the fairgrounds, which was where I’d been sent with many other Negroes. He was jailed along with two other white male participants, Florida State University students Steve Jones and a soft-spoken young man with a slight build named Frank O’Neil, who would soon take my place as chairman of Tallahassee CORE. Once he was inside his cell, Dan says, the sobering reality of what had happened finally hit him. “Realizing I was being locked up, I just felt this overwhelming sense of being a prisoner,” he says. “All these gates were things I couldn’t open, and I was in a place where I was being held—whether I willed to be there or not. I remember waking up all night long listening to that clanging of the doors as they brought more people in.”7
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